Tag Archives: hurricanes

A new study has found a correlation between the strength of the monsoon season in India and the number of hurricanes that make landfall in North America.

According to Kelly, La Niña and the Indian monsoon are correlated, but the strength of the monsoon influences the steering of hurricanes independently of La Niña fluctuations, which are responsible for changes in hurricane frequency. In other words, La Niña fluctuations may result in more Atlantic hurricanes, but strong Indian monsoons steer them further westward, making it more likely they will make landfall in the Americas.

It’s important to account for the correlation when studying hurricane steering and landfall probability.

In reading the article, ignore the propaganda promoting global warming, as the research has zero to do with that subject. It instead now provides meteorologists another clue to predicting the frequency and paths of hurricanes in the Atlantic.

USRA, the university consortium that operates the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, has released an update on the observatory’s condition following Hurricane Maria.

Currently, we have no contact with the Observatory. One observatory staff member located in Arecibo Town contacted via short-wave radio reports that trees are down, power is out, houses damaged and roads impassable. We have no reason to believe that staff sheltered at Arecibo Observatory are in immediate danger since they have generators, well water and plenty of food. This is a rapidly changing situation, and we are trying to do the best we can to contact USRA employees and find out their status.

Essentially, they don’t know much at this point.

Orbital ATK’s Pegasus rocket was successfully launched today from the bottom of its L-1011 airplane, placing in orbit a NASA constellation of eight smallsat satellites designed to study hurricanes.

he use of an eight-satellite constellation will allow for more frequent observations, allowing for a better characterization of the early stages in a cyclone’s formation and of the storm’s eventual decay. Once in orbit, the satellites will be spaced evenly around their orbital plane, achieving an angular separation of around 45 degrees from each other. The CYGNSS satellites were built by the Southwest Research Institute and the University of Michigan, while their deployer was developed by Sierra Nevada Corporation. Each satellite has a mass of 28.9 kilograms (63.7 lb), with an overall payload mass of 345.6 kilograms (761.8 lb) including the deployer. The CYGNSS mission is expected to last a minimum of two years.

This was the first Pegasus launch since 2013. I’m not sure why it has not been getting more business, but it does have another launch now scheduled for June.

I’m glad the science is settled! Despite predictions more than a decade ago that the world was faced with increased extreme weather due to human-caused global warming, including more hurricanes that were more powerful, the United States has now set a record for the longest stretch ever recorded, 129 months, without a single major hurricane.

Uh-oh: Forecasters at Colorado State University are predicting the 2014 hurricane season will be quieter than normal.

This is the same team that last year predicted 2013 would be one of the worst hurricane seasons in history. Instead, last year was one of the weakest in history, and as a result they lost their funding. That these same guys are now saying 2014 will be weak makes me fear for the American Atlantic coast. It could be wiped out this time!

They lost their funding, which is no surprise.

At the beginning of this year’s season, the team predicted 18 named storms. Nine of those, it said, would become hurricanes. Four would be major hurricanes. Here’s how it shook out: There were 13 named storms. Only two became hurricanes. Neither was a major hurricane.

They, like NOAA, expected an increase in extreme hurricanes and were wrong. In fact, they were so wrong that they illustrated clearly how much a guess all of these climate predictions are. You might as well flip a coin.

This failure also continues a pattern seen in recent years, where the number of actual hurricanes ends up far below their prediction, but the number of named hurricanes still ends up about right (see the charts on the prediction link above). I noted this in 2012, and now it has happened again. As I said then,

I wonder if their naming process was fudged to get them the numbers they wanted. While it might be possible to do that with the naming process of tropical storms, it is far more difficult to fudge the number of actual hurricanes. My skeptical nature and the recent willingness in the climate field to fiddle with data probably makes me more suspicious than I should be.

It is now eight years since a major hurricane made landfall in the United States.

[N]ot a single major hurricane, defined as a Category 3 storm or higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale —with minimum wind gusts of at least 111 mph (178 km/h) — has directly hit the United States in nearly eight years. That’s twice as long as any major hurricane landfall “drought” since 1915, and by far the longest on record since data began being collected prior to 1900. As of today (Sept. 12), it’s been 2,880 days since Hurricane Wilma, the last major hurricane to strike the United States, made landfall on Oct. 24, 2005.

As I’ve noted repeatedly, there is no evidence yet of an increase of extreme weather events as predicted by global warming advocates. In fact, some recent data suggests a decline, though I personally wouldn’t take that seriously either.

So, when Al Gore or Barack Obama or Dianne Feinstein starts running around like Chicken Little, claiming the sky is about to fall, remember these facts.

We are discontinuing our early December quantitative hurricane forecast for the next year … Our early December Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecasts of the last 20 years have not shown real-time forecast skill even though the hindcast studies on which they were based had considerable skill.

Those Via Meadia readers old enough to remember Hurricane Katrina can no doubt remember the many moralizing predictions of smug and condescending green climate hacktivists that followed: global warming was going to mean more hurricanes and bigger ones. Our coasts were toast; it was baked in the cake. The rising sea level combined with the inexorably rising number of major hurricanes were going to knock the climate skeptics out of the park.

Well, no. Andrew Revkin has called attention to this post from Roger Pielke’s blog which shows that as of today it has been 2,226 days since the last major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) hit the US mainland. Unless a big hurricane hits this winter, it means we are on track to break a 100 year record for the longest gap between major hurricanes hitting the coast. (The last Big Calm was between 1900 and 1906.) [emphasis mine]

A new climate theory: The Pakistani floods and Russian heatwave this summer might explain why the hurricane season going on right now in the North Atlantic started off so slow.

NOAA has issued an update on its annual hurricane prediction, calling for an active season with 14 to 20 named storms. This prediction is in conjunction with the formation of the cool La Niña in the mid-Pacific Ocean.

“Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America’s quest for the moon… Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America’s greatest human triumphs.”
–San Antonio Express-News